So he got together with aeronautical engineer Fred Jones, who had helped design DeHaviland airplanes during the First World War, and started drawing them out, tweaking them, building models ... and ended up creating a design for a flying-boat pontoon that would become the basis of the Aerohydrocraft. The challenge, as he saw it — or, rather, the opportunity — was that although plenty of boats and pontoons were streamlined hydrodynamically below the water level, they typically weren’t designed with aerodynamics in mind. 
A portrait of Victor Strode circa 1921, from a Hill Aeronautical School brochure. (Image: Oregon Historical Society)Strode especially was fascinated by the opportunity to harness ground effect to lift a hull higher out of the water so that it could go faster. “Ground effect” is an aviation term for the boost in lift that an airplane gets when it’s close to the ground. The wing, as it moves through the air, pushes air downward to support the airplane; when the plane is in the air, that air is pushing against air, so it doesn’t provide as much lift as it would if it were pushing against a solid mass such as the Earth, or the surface of a lake. Would there be a way, Strode mused, to design the upper works of a boat so that it pushed air downward, like an airplane wing does, helping lift the hull out of the water or even bringing the whole thing entirely clear, literally flying an inch or two above the water with only the outboard motor touching it? If it could be done, this would be a game changer. Above a given very-slow speed, pushing water out of the way is a very energy-intensive process even in the most well-designed hull. You know this instinctively if you’ve ever been on a dock pulling a boat toward you with the dock line. It takes a very gentle touch to move the boat slowly toward you, but to get it to move faster you have to pull really hard. 
Oregon inventor Victor Strode’s revolutionary boat, the “aerohydrocraft,” made the cover of Popular Science in March 1933. (Image: PopSci)That’s why speedboats are made to lift out of the water and plane across the surface — so that as little water is displaced as possible. Strode tried a few different approaches, but the one that tested best in wind-tunnel models was an outlandish-looking thing that looked like a thick section of airplane wing viewed through a prism. The cabin or cockpit sat in the middle section, which was the longest and thickest part. On each side of it was a short section of a smaller wing, following the exact same profile as the center but about 40 percent smaller. On the outboard side of each of these was another, even smaller section. Basically, it was a boat made of seven slices of airplane wing glued together with the biggest one in the middle, stepping outward. 
One of several Strode Aeroliner designs, from 1921. The Aeroliner was a bit ahead of its time, and never went into production. (Image: Oregon Historical Society)Another breakthrough was the power plant. Strode realized that a propeller moving air, as on an airplane, didn’t provide much thrust relative to the amount of energy it had to expend. But a propeller in water (a screw) was a wonderfully efficient thing. With his mostly-airborne boat skipping across the surface of the water on its cushion of air, a large outboard motor dropping down into the water could provide tremendous thrust relative to its power output, by airplane standards.
BY EARLY 1933 Strode had a single-seat model of the Aerohydrocraft built, by the wood shop of the Ostlind brothers in Marshfield (today’s Coos Bay). When it was done, he fitted it with a 55-horsepower Evinrude outboard motor tucked down into a special motor well at the back, climbed aboard, and set out on Tenmile Lake to try it out. Most likely he chose Tenmile Lake because Currier’s Village was there in Lakeside, with a first-class restaurant and marina and, usually, a bumper crop of Hollywood celebrities getting away from the crowds and the cameras. “It was a thrilling experience for those watching to see the little 17-foot racer in its trial performance lift above the water surface at about 45 miles an hour to ride on its cushion of air,” Ruth Strode wrote, in her brief biography of her husband’s life and work. “It was airborne! An (airplane-style) rudder mounted aft on the craft was then used in auxiliary to the water rudder. It served the dual purpose of vertical fin and directional control with the boat at high speed.” Even with just 55 horsepower, the little racer was overpowered, she added. “Opened to only part of full throttle,” she wrote, “it could attain speeds of up to 70 miles per hour.” Strode’s boat was a sensation, and for a few months everyone was talking about it. It was featured at Portland’s 1933 automobile show. The boat, trailered up to Portland and launched in Lake Oswego, got even more attention from the rich and famous there. A Pathe Newsreel crew showed up and did a newsreel story about it to play in movie theaters nationwide. And, best of all, Popular Science magazine featured the boat on its front cover in March 1933. “It behaves like an ordinary craft until it attains a speed of 45 miles per hour,” the PopSci article notes. “At this velocity, which corresponds to the taking-off speed of an airplane, an abrupt change occurs. The pilot can feel the boat rise from the water as the fins take hold on the air. Only the propeller beneath the hull remains in the water where its full thrust is effective.”
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And a year and a half later, the boat was there, finished, ready to launch. It was to be christened the Jack Luihn, after a popular civic leader. Compared with the little prototype racer, the Jack Luihn was a hulking monster. It was 24 feet long, and powered with a flathead Ford V-8 engine. Most likely the craft was underpowered, because according to Ruth Strode’s biography, it topped out at 45 miles per hour — a lot by boat standards, but considerably less than the smaller single-seat prototype could do. In the fuselage, there was a tight cockpit with seating for two people; behind them, there was an ambulance bay, with accommodations for two patients on stretchers. From looking at photographs of the launch, it appears the ambulance bay was open-air, like the back of a pickup truck. 
The Jack Luihn shortly after its launch and christening, at the foot of Stark Street. (Image: vintageportland. wordpress.com)And on that spring day, at the foot of Stark Street where a few dozen years earlier the ferry used to land, a group of city notables was there to launch what they surely believed was the future of high-speed motorboating. There had been plenty of coverage of the event in the Portland Morning Oregonian and Portland Journal, so a crowd of locals had come down to watch as well. It was a proud moment for inventor Victor Strode. His wife and biographer, Ruth Strode (a staff writer for the Portland Journal) christened the new service boat with a bottle of champagne, and the futuristic speedboat motored away across the river as waterfront factories celebrated and welcomed the new boat with whistle blasts. So — was the Jack Luihn a success? The answer seems to be a pretty firm “no.” However, its failure must have involved some embarrassing details, because there is simply nothing more about it in the Oregonian — until six months later, in January 1937, when a “year in review” article mentions that it was “noisily christened and then quietly retired from public view.” 
This is the article about Victor Strode and his aerohydrocraft that ran in the March 1931 issue of Popular Science Magazine, the issue in which it was the cover story. (Image: PopSci)Just seven days later, a three-inch-long article buried deep in Page 11 announced that the City Council had voted to officially release any interest in it. “For some time the boat has been out of service,” the article read, “but it was said the boat might be salvaged if title were transferred to Mr. Strode.” The obvious implication is that this larger version of the aerohydrocraft design suffered from some sort of design flaw that would require more than just repairs and reinforcement. It would have to go back to the drawing board entirely, so that the inventor could invent a solution to the problem. But I was unable to find more details about what happened. The Oregon Historical Society has the Victor Strode papers, but they’re from Ruth, who was Victor’s number-one fan and not about to air any of his dirty laundry. All she mentions is that it was washed away and wrecked in the flood of 1948, many years later and after Victor’s death. But at least one educated guess can be made, based on the laws of physics, as to why the aerohydrocraft didn’t work out for Portland. 
The Aerohydrocraft’s logo, presumably developed for commercial production of the War Department cutwater-equipped model. (Image: Oregon Historical Society)At speed, this boat would be essentially skipping across the surface of the water like a skipping stone, half-hovering in the air, with the propeller shaft dropping down into the drink. Throw the rudder over to make a hard left turn, and what’s to prevent the centrifugal force of the turn from tipping the boat over until the outboard “wingtip” touches the water doing 60 mph? What would happen then? A jolt? A terrifying cartwheel crash? It’s hard to say. In the smaller racer, with less mass over the water, the airplane-style rudder was apparently effective enough to prevent this. Maybe with a larger, heavier boat, it wasn’t. In any case, the Aerohydrocraft disappeared from the world of boat types almost as quickly as it vanished from the Portland waterfront. Today, few powerboat aficionados have even heard of them — or of the time Portland took a chance on the cutting edge of naval architecture.
IN 1944, VICTOR STRODE had one more crack at making the aerohydrocraft a success as a boat. This time, the boat had a cutwater bow rather than the flat airfoil shape, and would be made with fiberglass. The War Department was considering a big order to use as ambulance boats, and had a prototype being built at the Hughes Aircraft Culver City factory. Howard Hughes himself was very interested in the project. Unfortunately, the war ended before that happened. The prototype worked beautifully — apparently Strode fixed whatever it was that ailed the Jack Luihn — but the War Department never placed the promised order, and that was that. Victor Strode wouldn’t live to see it. He died in the late spring of 1944 at the age of 51.
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